Friday, August 27, 2010

"The new Dan Brown!" claim excited fans, who love Stieg Larsson's brand of page-turning, investigative excitement, and who relish the sight of the same book being read by so many people.

"The new Dan Brown," sigh the less easily impressed, who recognise something horribly familiar in the sloppily-written, even-more-sloppily-edited prose with a manipulative cliff-hanger shoehorned into the end of every chapter, and who despair of the sight of every single fucker on the bus making this their quarterly read.

Larsson is, to my mind, a couple of notches above Dan Brown. Make of that what you will.

5
comments:

Conor
said...

I'm steering well clear of this "girl who kicked the bee in the face" (c. red lemonade) craze, but if you want an excellent series of detective novels try Fred Vargas. She's French, and quite brilliant. She fairly hoovers up crime writing awards too. "The Chalk-Circle Man" is really, really good.

Conor - Heh, I've taken to calling the books that too since kitty cat coined the phrase. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into Vargas.

Annie - I read your posts at the time and really enjoyed them.My good wife is quite a fan of Brookmyre. so far my experience of him has been limited to one scratched audiobook, but it had me in stitches while driving.

Colm - My apologies if it looked like I had deleted your comment, Blogger's new spam detection thingy is obviously intent on identifying anything with a link as perilously dangerous. I'd read that spoof before, but it's so fucking good that I still read it another two or three times.

About Me

Born in 1457, Andrew spent his formative years hunting rattlesnakes on the banks of the Mississippi River. Tiring of this, he worked alongside Yasmine Bleeth as a stockbroker in New York, before jacking it in to join the Amish community. A briefly succesful music career in Japan followed before the sake got the better of him and he retired to an obscure part of the public sector in Ireland. He will be pleasantly astonished if anyone chooses to listen to him. He thinks he can spell really well. He feels bad about the rattlesnakes now.